> There is normally no advantage to consuming more protein than 0.82g/lb (1.8g/kg) of *total bodyweight* per day
And there are other analyses out there recommending closer to 1g/lb of total bodyweight, and this analysis is much more convincing: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/protein-science/
In 2026, you can't get a straight answer to this question, because anything protein related is SEO-optimized blogspam (thanks Google).
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7926405/#sec5-nutri...
Our biology is immensely adaptable, so anyone declaring you absolutely need some finely decided very specific thing in order to be "be healthy" should be treated skeptically.
With regards to protein specifically: your body doesn't trade in proteins as inputs, it trades in amino acids which cracked off the protein chains you eat. Everything else is just trying to keep the crowd of gut bacteria from making you feel uncomfortable.
You don't need to eat "high protein food" to get adequate protein.
Let's say an 80 kg moderately active man needs to eat 2600 kcal/day to maintain body weight. According to current guidelines, that man needs about 0.8g/kg of protein per day, or 64 grams per day.
White bread has about 2.6 grams of protein per 77 kcal.
https://tools.myfooddata.com/nutrition-facts/174924/wt1
You have: 2600 kcal / (77 kcal / 2.6 grams)
You want: grams
* 87.792208
/ 0.011390533
That works out to about 88 grams of protein per day eating nothing except white bread.
It's difficult to not get enough protein unless you're eating too few calories overall.
O.8g/kg was set as the target to avoid protein deficiency, not as any measure of optimal. Current guidelines are 50-100% higher. Optimal for muscle growth is higher still according to many studies.
If you are trying to hit the bro-science 1g/lb of body weight, that’s a lot of protein and most will likely have trouble hitting it without supplements (or eating mass amounts of meat).
Of course most people proteinmaxxing are not actually growing any muscle but eating protein fortified Doritos makes them feel like they are doing something healthy.
Whether that’s the right approach or not is debatable. It’s certainly easier to target 1g/lb of total body mass than .82g/lb of lean body mass. (But certainly it’s easier to eat enough protein to hit .82g/lb lean body mass.)
What's "regular old high protein food"? Do you mean something like meat every meal? When I recorded my meals I found my protein intake to be quite low (I don't eat meat. I eat fish but not every day.).
and yeah people who say that protein is easy to get assume that you're eating meat with every meal
on a vegetarian diet you get it from random sources, bread has a little, cheese has a little, it all adds up to the point where you're basically fine especially if you try to include a main protein/meat replacement in every meal (tofu, seitan, chickpeas) but I'm just not a big person and the amount of food I'd need to eat to reach the optimal grams/lb would be too much without supplementation
The recommended minimum is 1.2 g/kg (0.55g/lb)
I'm curious how, historically, people have fared, as meat has not been as available as it is now (though this has probably varied considerably over time)
Getting enough protein and exercising is crucial as you age, and it's something a lot of people have historically not understood, since as your metabolism slows, you get less hungry right when your protein needs are increasing.
They still want to eat Doritos, and now they can buy the protein Doritos and act like they are following the doctor's orders, even though that's not in the spirit of what the doctor was saying. There are also a lot of products that change little to nothing, but still slap a "Protein" label on the front of the box.
We saw similar things with "low carb" versions of everything during the Atkin's craze. Before that we saw everything made into "low fat" in the 80s, which we're still suffering from. It's likely a big reason why we as a society have a need for weight loss drugs in the first place.
For averge Joe to hit 0.82g/lb he would need to eat 600g of lean beef every day. Or 33 eggs.
... also Menno Henselmans while he does a lot of great work that outweights everything he posts tons pseudo-scientific where's often clear he just did a basic Google Scholar search. Plus he seems too eaeger to "debunk" but often barely even understands deficiencies of many of the studies he references. A lot of people take his website for some holy grail of "scientific bodybuilding" because he's trying too hard to market it that way and he's been wrong many times and built arguments on foundations he barely understands.
Examine.com for example has different figures and it's a website where studies are reviewed by actual PHDs and graded by their strength not just simple Google Scholar search.
I would not want to do that but there’s no practical upper limit on how much protein a healthy person can digest.